At its 55th meeting held on 31 May and 1 June 2012 in Osaka, Japan, the European Telecommunications Standards Institute’s (ETSI) Smart Card Platform Technical Committee agreed a new form factor for the UICC, popularly known as the SIM card.

Today’s SIM card designs take up a significant amount of space inside a mobile device. This space is more and more valuable in today’s handsets which deliver an ever increasing number of features.

The fourth form factor (4FF) card will be 40% smaller than the current smallest SIM card design, at 12.3mm wide by 8.8mm high, and 0.67mm thick. It can be packaged and distributed in a way that is backwards compatible with existing SIM card designs. The new design will offer the same functionality as all current SIM cards.

According to ETSI, the SIM is the most successful smart card application ever. A SIM card is used to securely associate a mobile device with a customer account, preventing fraud and ensuring that calls are correctly routed to customers. It is an essential security feature of mobile networks, and is integrated into every GSM, UMTS and LTE device. Over 25 billion SIM card and derivatives have been produced so far, and the industry continues to issue over 4.5 billion SIM cards each year.

The new form factor was adopted by industry with the involvement of major mobile network operators, smart card suppliers and mobile device manufacturers. The new design will be published in due course in ETSI’s TS 102 221 specification, freely available like all ETSI standards from the ETSI website.

MacDailyNews Take: Note to the iPhone wannabes and roadkill of the world: What Apple wants, Apple gets. And don’t you forget it.

The DCW in reference to RIMM and the SIDAGTMBTTS in reference to Dell are accepted with a smile. These are both companies that were dismissive of Apple when Apple was an underdog. Everyone likes to see the little guy achieve great things and put the big boys in their place.

The problem is that Apple is now the big guy, and them getting their way because they are big is exactly the thing that you were against when other companies did it 10 years ago.

MDN, You don’t need to apologize for Apple’s dominance, but you don’t need to be asses either. Apple will (hopefully one day long in the future) be on the decline. When that happens, it will be nice to not have spit on every single person that wasn’t on the Apple bandwagon.

“Be nice, be tepid, be sweet, be bland, be dispassionate, be equitable, be even-handed, be undogmatic, be kind, be forgiving, be laid-back, be BORING . . . be . . . be . . . more like Caspar Milquetoast, MDN!”

Right, Gregg? Right, Charlie? Right, Rex? Don’t ruffle ANYONE’s feathers in any respect, right, guys? There’s never a reason for payback of any kind or measure when one has been the crap-fest target of the tech industry for over 30 years, right?

Well, sucks to be you folks when you visit this site, for passion, commitment, loyalty–and uncompromised love–for a company, its leaders, and its products remain intact and inviolable. Why not go somewhere else for your news if the editorial policies of this site offend you so? (Answer: Trolls, one and all, they like the smell of their own ordure.)

Well, call it what you will, but I’ve owned Macs since the very first one and I stuck with this company through it all, and have read and enjoyed MDN for a good part of that time… and this particular take just seemed unusually – and unnecessarily – arrogant. Frankly Mr. Cromwell, your response seems overly sensitive. Back under your bridge sir, back under your bridge.